History Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Summer 2020

HIS 101

World Civilization 1

Online (H080)

Dr. Joseph Peterson

This course is an introduction to the history of World Civilizations from their beginnings
in the city-states of Mesopotamia and India almost 6,000 years ago, up to the Age
of Exploration in fifteenth-century Europe. Our story begins when humans first domesticated
animals, brewed beer, baked bread, exchanged goods, and wrote legends about their
gods. It ends with European kingdoms fighting wars, making treaties, establishing
their modern boundaries, and then turning outward—expanding their powerful reach across
the globe and making contact (often violent) with new cultures and civilizations.
As historians, it will be our job to explain and evaluate change over time—to understand
how much we have in common with people of the past, but also how profoundly we differ
from them. Themes include the rise of empires, the rise (and sometimes fall) of democratic political systems, the changing relationship between religion and politics, the increase in global connections and technological exchanges between people groups, the way groups construct their identities and distinguish themselves from enemies and outsiders, and the changing daily lives of ordinary people. We will learn about battles and grand diplomatic events, but
we will be especially careful to read between the lines of our sources, to try to
recover the perspectives of those who often were unable to leave us a record of their
thoughts—women, peasants, workers, the colonized, etc.

HIS 102

World Civilization II

Online (H080)

Dr. Joshua Haynes

How did we get to where we are today? This course is designed to help us better understand
the world in which we now live by examining some key global events and developments
since 1500. Our goal will be not only to study important figures, societies, and events
on their own terms, but to begin thinking about the world as a global network of social,
cultural, economic, and political connections. In so doing, we will examine a wide
array of materials and sources including historical documents, film, music, etc.,
all of which will help us to flush out the issues, people, and events which have shaped
the modern world over the last five hundred years.

HIS 430

The French Revolution and Napoleon

Online

Dr. Arad Gigi

The French Revolutionaries ushered in the modern world. We are living in the world
made by the Revolution and continue to have similar disputes to those of the revolutionaries.
The rise of nationalism, mass conscription and total war, separation of church and
state, gender relations and roles and rights of women in modern society, race and
slavery—the Revolution stimulated the largest slave rebellion in modern history that
ended in the formation of the first black republic, Haiti— public ceremonies, constitutions,
and so much more. As an important an event, the French Revolution also stimulated
some of the most interesting scholarship in history. HIS430 introduces students to
this amazing era and an opportunity to engage in these historical and historiographical
debates.

Topics include: nationalism, war, gender, religion, in the revolutionary period, festivals
and cemeteries, slavery and abolition in the French empire, the Napoleonic Empire
in Europe, the Napoleonic Code, and the legacies of the Revolution. Aux Armes! To
Arms, Citizens!

HIS 101/102: World Civilization Registration Guide

Find the right HIS 101/102 class for you!

Enroll in the online section with Dr. Luckhardt. *Online requires discipline and motivation.
If you lack this, it’s harder than a face-to-face class.

Dr. Ural’s class has students seated at tables of 6; lecture breaks every 15 minutes
to ensure understanding before moving on.

Dr. Tuuri and Dr. LaPierre's classes are taught as a large lecture class with shorter
meeting times (50 mins, 3x week).

HIS 101

World Civilization I

Online (H080)

Dr. Courtney Luckhardt

In this course, we trace the story of civilization from prehistory through the fifteenth
century. Through a kaleidoscope of kings and slaves, warriors and philosophers, farmers
and merchants, we will focus on certain themes. Four themes intersect in all the societies
we study this semester.

1) religious development and syncretism

2) elite power and political organization

3) technological innovations

4) trade and economic development

To focus on these themes and questions, we will be close reading primary sources (that
is, texts produced by the societies we are studying, not by modern scholars) from
many different civilizations. We will learn history by doing it – this means that
students will learn to read and interpret primary evidence and come to their own conclusions
about pre-modern societies.

HIS 101

World Civilization I

MWF 11:00-12:00 (H001)

Dr. Rebecca Tuuri

This 3-credit-hour course will examine the origins of the human species to 1500 C.E.
(Common Era) from a scholarly historical perspective. We will consider how human
beings around the world defined themselves through art, writing, music, food and/or
other forms of cultural creation; religion; law; gender relations and other forms
of social organization; and warfare. We will also consider the important role that
geography and climate have played in the development of human societies. Although
this class will meet in a large lecture hall, we will incorporate discussion and active
learning into our class.

HIS 101

World Civilization

TR 1:00-2:15 (H007)

Dr. Susannah Ural

This class offers a sweeping examination of world cultures from the beginning of the
human record through 1500 C.E. The idea is not to make you an expert on all of world
history through the sixteenth-century. Rather, we want to expose you to the people,
ideas, and events that shaped this period and help you learn how to interpret and
analyze that information. This will make you a better informed and active member of
society today. To accomplish these goals, you will attend weekly class meetings that
include discussions about sources from the time period we are studying. Those are
found in your e-reader Envisioning World Civilizations: A Primary Source Workbook.
Primary sources are original documents or artifacts from the period under study. They
could be laws, letters or diaries, drawings, pottery, weapons, songs, poetry, or many
other things. Your reader is a collection of primary sources relating to cultures
around the globe. Secondary sources are interpretations and analyses of the past,
such as what you find in your main textbook, Voyages in World History, Brief Edition.
Primary and secondary sources are the two key tools historians work with to test our
theories and reach informed conclusions about the past. By exposing you to them, we
are teaching you how to interpret the past for yourself, and how to critically assess
information when it is presented to you in today’s world. Course assignments include
short quizzes to help you understand the readings, short in-class writing practice
(you turn in three of these), four examinations, required attendance and engaged participation,
and, for your final project, the creation of a world civ meme.

HIS 101 will address the following learning objectives of the GEC:

Students will evaluate major developments in world history, the historical roots of
contemporary global cultures, or the literary, philosophical, or religious contributions
of world cultures.

Students will develop a topic and present ideas through writing in an organized, logical,
and coherent form and in a style that is appropriate for the discipline and the situation.

Students will use Standard English grammar, punctuation, spelling, and usage.

Students will comprehend and proficiently interpret text.

HIS 102

World Civilization II

TR 1:00-2:15 (H002)

Dr. Joshua Haynes

How did we get to where we are today? This course is designed to help us better understand
the world in which we now live by examining some key global events and developments
since 1500. Our goal will be not only to study important figures, societies, and events
on their own terms, but to begin thinking about the world as a global network of social,
cultural, economic, and political connections. In so doing, we will examine a wide
array of materials and sources including historical documents, film, music, etc.,
all of which will help us to flush out the issues, people, and events which have shaped
the modern world over the last five hundred years.

HIS 322

American Indian History since 1840

TR 9:30-10:45

Dr. Joshua Haynes

This course is about the making of modern American Indian nations. We will examine
broadly the varied experiences of American Indian peoples from 1840 to the present.
Often portrayed as hapless victims of Euro-American imperialism, we will focus on
the ways that Native Americans actively sought to shape their relationships with colonizers.
We will examine the ways indigenous peoples in the United States responded to the
host of stresses that accompanied the rapid and often violent social, cultural, and
environmental transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will explore
the ways Native Americans negotiated their encounters with other indigenous groups
as well as with non-Indian peoples. We will pay particular attention to the ways Indians
adapted and changed to preserve their territory, their cultures, their sovereignty,
and their rights to self-determination.

HIS 323

The Vikings

TR 2:30-3:45

Dr. Courtney Luckhardt

The image of the Vikings in modern popular culture has been as fierce warriors or
as Wagner’s opera-singing Viking women. Another common view of Vikings is that of
the blood-thirsty pagan barbarians who descended upon peaceful monks or settlements.
This view is based on the sources written by the early medieval victims of Norse raids.
The later medieval Scandinavian saga literature painted their warrior ancestors as
noble savages, and historians have examined the Vikings as one of these two extremes.

However, Viking raids were merely one part of a complex adaptation by the
Norse to the marginal lands of Scandinavia. Raids were certainly a portion of that
adaptation, but so too were explorations, foreign settlement, trade, and extended
subsistence activities at the home in Scandinavia. The Norse were also savvy merchants,
gifted craftsmen, hardworking farmers, and cunning political players who built kingdoms
in Europe, established relations with the Muslim world, and even made it to the shores
of North America. This course will explore the culture, history, arts and worldviews
of the Old Norse, including their mythology, the saga literature, and their conversion
to Christianity. We will also investigate how the Vikings have been understood and
represented through the centuries between their days and ours.

HIS 329

Modern European Women’s History

TR 1:00-2:15

Dr. Allison Abra

In the era of Women’s Marches and #MeToo, understanding women’s historical oppression,
agency, and activism, as well as the ways that individual women and gender relations
have influenced historical events, has perhaps never been more pressing. In this course
we will survey the history of women and gender in Europe from the Enlightenment through
to the present day. We will explore how gender has both shaped, and been shaped by
key issues, ideas, and events in this period, including war and revolution; innovations
in science, art, and industry; imperialism, state-building; social and political movements;
crime, popular culture, and family life. We will examine how gender intersected with
and helped to define other categories of difference such as race, class, sexuality,
and nation. In so doing, we will consider the wide-ranging social roles and experiences
of European women during this period – as mothers, workers, adventurers, political
activists, and military combatants – through which they re-shaped the history of the
continent and the world.

Note: This course is one that helps to fulfill the requirements of the Women’s and Gender
Studies minor

HIS 333

Europe in the Nineteenth Century

TR 9:30-10:45

Dr. Joseph Peterson

Napoleon, Jane Austen, and Beethoven… Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sherlock Holmes,
and Jack the Ripper… Mary Shelley, Mary Cassatt, and Mary Baker Eddy… Frederic Chopin,
Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini… steamships, railroads, and Women’s Suffrage… “Human
Rights,” World Fairs, the Eiffel Tower, and the scramble for Africa… Impressionism,
germ theory, dynamite, and the Boy Scouts… the first bicycles, the first department
stores, the first machine guns… the first hipsters, the first human zoos and concentration
camps, and the first science fiction… The first age of mass literacy, mass advertising,
and mass politics… The first recorded use of the word “socialism,” of the word “antisemitism,”
of “feminism,” “nationalism,” “dystopia,” “agnosticism,” and “homosexual.” Why are
so many of the issues and questions raised by nineteenth-century Europeans still with
us today? Why does an age so seemingly distant and innocent—so “Victorian”—still feel
so modern? What makes us modern, for that matter? We cannot begin to understand our present without understanding
its origins in the nineteenth century.

HIS 373

African-American History Survey, 1619-1890

MW 9:30-1-:45

Dr. Rebecca Tuuri

This is a course that encompasses the history of African Americans from the beginning
of slavery in the Americas through 1877. It is a history of great courage, endurance,
and pride as well as of cruelty, indifference, and sadness. This course will not only
provide students with an overview of significant events, movements, and people from
the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade through Reconstruction, but equally importantly,
it will illuminate cultural formation and efforts towards freedom and equality within
enslaved and free African American communities. We will learn about this history by
reading scholarly work about slavery and the words of the enslaved and free from this
time period. We will pay extra attention to how larger American society, especially
that of white America, has manipulated images and ideas about African Americans from
the past to the present. Finally, we will consider how “memory,” literacy, and access
to archival sources has affected American and African American historiography.

HIS 400

History Capstone

As American as Motherhood and Apple Pie: A History of Nationalism in the United States

MW 11:00AM - 12:15PM

Dr. Andrew P. Haley

Americans lack a common ancestry or a shared religion. We have no official language
and the national anthem is loved by few. And yet for over two hundred years it has
meant something to be an American. This course examines American nationalism, the
common threads of political and cultural meaning that create nationhood and considers
how various definitions of the nation have brought us together and torn us apart.
The class will explore case studies—from Thanksgiving to baseball, from the Pledge
of Allegiance to the Great American Novel—in order to better understand how Americans
have defined what it means to be an American.

History 400 is a capstone research seminar. During the first half of the course, we
will collectively explore examples of American nationalism in a discussion-based seminar.
Discussions will be based on readings from a variety of primary sources (novels, plays,
movies, autobiographies, songs, and more) and secondary sources. During the second
half of the course, with ample support from the instructor, students will conduct
their own historical investigation into the controversies surrounding national identity
in the United States or abroad. Students will be required to prepare and submit a
research proposal, an outline, an annotated bibliography, and a final fourteen-to-seventeen-page
research paper. Students are also required to do two ten-minute oral presentations
and create a web page.

HIS 448

The Holocaust

TR 11:00-12:15

Dr. Joseph Peterson

An event of extreme evil and inhumanity—perpetrated hardly more than a generation
ago in the heart of the modern, “civilized” West—the Holocaust is a challenge to historians:
can history help us understand how humans could commit such genocidal acts? What are
some of the long-term roots of Antisemitism? Is Christianity to blame? Or is it modern
racial “science”? What historical conditions led to the rise of Nazi Germany and its
attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews? What made perpetrators willing to execute Jews
at close range or to herd them into gas chambers? What range of

choices—from compliance to resistance—did Jewish and other victims really have? Is
it ever okay to compare other acts of evil to the Holocaust? How has the Holocaust
challenged and influenced faith in humanity and in God? How is the memory of the Holocaust
still used and abused today, in political, historical, and theological debates? We
will use readings, films, photographs, and survivor testimony to explore the answers
to these and other questions. (Description adapted from Dr. E. Umansky)

HIS 485

From Cruise Missiles to Terrorism

The World of Warfare Since Vietnam

MW 11:00-12:15

Dr. Andrew Wiest

This class will investigate the trends in warfare since the close of the Vietnam War.
While the west, still focusing on the Cold War, was involved in a revolution in military
practice based on the ever expanding miracles of weapons technology, practice in much
of the rest of the world trended toward tactics of insurgency and protracted war.
And, while the world’s superpowers often dawdled, smaller nations asserted their place
in warfare as states crumbled into a 4th generation of conflict. A close investigation
of these military/social trends will focus attention on the Arab-Israeli wars, UN
peacekeeping, both Gulf wars, the Russian wars, terrorism, and the ongoing Global
War on Terror.